The Gong Show

Every session at SXSW that I attended was podcast. Obviously, lots of the sessions don’t translate well to podcast form because there were too many panelists to keep track of or there was too much Powerpoint. But, some of the Podcasts should translate quite nicely.

Here are two SXSW podcasts I recommend:

• Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy with Joi Ito and Justin Hall
• Bruce Sterling’s Closing Rant

And here’s the main podcast page.

Update: Parsefork apparently died… there’s now a porn site at their old domain. Sucks. Anyway, I killed the link in this post.

Original Post: Wow! Parsefork is a data-geek-music-snob’s dream come true. If you fit that description, check it out.

There were plenty of gems in the open source hardware keynote dialog between Limor Fried and Phil Torrone, but in the spirit of filtering down I’ll choose just one.

The crowd got pretty excited by a cigarette pack which was used as a housing for a cellphone jammer built by Limor. It’s like the cellphone jammer from the first Mission: Impossible movie, but in a cooler casing. It works within a ten – fifteen foot radius. Yes, this is technically illegal to build because it violates FCC rules, but no harm, no foul, right?

Limor, a MIT Media Lab alumnus that is currently a fellow at Eyebeam in NYC, releases the full technical specs for all her projects under a Creative Commons license. She sells kits to aggregate the materials necessary to implement her specs in a convenient fashion, but the kits are by no means necessary because people can just buy the materials directly from vendors online. Someone in the audience asked if she was able to make a sustainable business for herself using the model. Limor responded that she was doing quite well and supporting herself on selling kits alone.

Open source hardware, driven by the DIY culture rising tide, is an exciting area, and I look forward to seeing how it develops going forward.

Josh Kopelman’s post entitled “The Penny Gap” has turned into a meme. The debate on his post largely misinterprets his point, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I commented on the post, but by the time I was done commenting, I realized that I had written a comment the size of an individual blog post, so I’m cross-posting here:

The graphical explainations above are taken from Josh’s post. I hope attribution and respect for his insightful idea is enough to satisfy copyright :)

“The Penny Gap” is not an problem of economics, it’s a usability problem. The act of paying for something online (regardless of the cost) requires collecting so much more information (CC#, Paypal Acct, Exp Date, etc) which is subject to data entry errors and form fatigue. Plus, users still don’t have a means of paying for things on the internet that they can trust unconditionally. (In user testing at Homestead, I constantly heard the complaint that they don’t like giving their CC# out on the internet because they are worried about identity theft).

If paying $0.01 for a service had the same barriers to entry as paying nothing for a service, then I think the cliff on your graph above would almost completely vanish. There would still be a tiny cliff to account for no being able to use “FREE” in branding, plus the mental block involved in assessing value. But, if we could solve the usability problems associated with paying for services on the internet, then the cliff depicted above would be an order of magnitude smaller than Josh’s graph outlines.

However, this point is largely theoritical because I don’t think it’s possible to make the barriers to entry in both cases completely equal. I am always interested in services (Google Checkout, PayPal features, etc) that try to reduce the barriers involved in payment over the internet.

In the session entitled “Mapping: Where the F#*% Are We Now?” I learned about a fascinating project called Mapstraction. Mapstraction is an API that abstracts the Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft mapping APIs.

If you program your maps mashup using Mapstraction then you’re not tied into a single company’s map product. It makes switching from Google Maps to Yahoo Maps (or vice versa) as silky smooth as possible.

This is important for two reasons:

1. Each map API company competes in both service quality and feature sets. the best company when you are first implementing you technology will not necessarily remain the best six months from now. This API prevents lock-in into an inferior product. With Mapstraction you benefit from all competition because you have no barriers to switching APIs.
2. When small map mashup companies (Flagr, Frappr, Plazes, etc) are discussing potential funding or exits, being tied into a particular company’s mapping API can be disadventageous. If you are dependent on Google Maps API and are negotiating with Google, then Google has some leverage. Similarly, if you are dependent on Google Maps API and are negotiating with Yahoo, then reimplementing your mapping code with likely be an annoying acquisition hurdle.

It looks like Mapstraction is still a little early, but I think it’s an exciting idea, and that’s why it qualifies as one of my SXSW gems. I’d be interested to know if people actually working in a map mashup startup think this is interesting.

I am currently at SXSW and loving every second of it. There are a bunch of great resources about the event: live blogging, community blogging, and the panel podcasts. So, rather than add to the all the information, I hope that my commentary can be a filter. I’m going to post a couple of ideas/thoughts that I thought were really interesting. That way, I will act as a filter for the event by highlighting very little chunks.

I had not heard of the Ni-Chen Paradox prior to SXSW. In the “When Communities Attack” panel by Chris Tolles of Topix.net introduced me to the concept.

The Ni-Chen Paradox is as follows: a community like a message board thinks that be requiring registrations to order to post they will be filtering out bad content. However, trolls are more likely to register for a service than causal-but-genuinely-interested users. Therefore, requiring registrations in order to post content actually filters out the good content and increases the amount of flames/trolling posts. By allowing anyone to continue to the community without registration you end up with higher quality content.

Topix.net testifies to the validity of the Ni-Chen paradox based on their own experience. Also, they showed a traffic growth graph. There was a clear hockey-stick inflection point in the graph, which occurred when Topix removed the requirement that only registered users could post to their forums.

I hope you found this as interesting as I did. More gems to come!

Valleywag’s post on “The New Payola” (which is a rehash of a WSJ post) is an interesting bite-sized insight. The gist:

Lily Allen, the young singer whose rocketed to stardom with songs such as Smile and LDN, says: “They won’t advertise your album unless you give them extra material.” Nobody is accusing Apple of traditional payola. The concessions it squeezes, from performers and their record labels, benefit consumers foremost, and Apple only in so far as the company cements their loyalty.

Exclusive content is a powerful customer acquisition technique. In the case of traditional payola, a chunk of change is exchanged under the table and the end result is typically worse radio content (any music that requires payola to get decent air time is likely not as good as the “non-payola” music it replaces on the air). However, in the case of this new Apple payola, a revenue-generating customer acquisition tool is exchanged (which is far better than illicit payola money that can’t move the company numbers) AND the end result is a bigger content catalogue which improves the iTunes service. Smart move.

It’s a double win for Apple and a loss for both content creators and consumers. It’s a loss for content creators because it limits the amount of revenue they can receive from their new content by making it an Apple exclusive. And, it’s a loss for consumers because the content is locked up in the Apple store. If you (the consumer) don’t want to patronize the DRM-laced Apple iTunes Music Store, then you can never get access to the content.

This tactic is not as illegal as traditional payola, and it is more effective than traditional payola. I’m surprised media companies that had their hands in both retail and radio didn’t try similar tactics, perhaps there was no overlap between radio and retail.

I know it’s not a *new* feature, but I was unaware that Google allowed its users to export their search history through authenticated RSS. That’s big. I suspect we will start seeing third-party search analytics companies cropping up that will suck in your search history in exchange for personalization, recommendations, and filtering in niches.

For example, if Last.fm sucked in my search history they could see what bands I have been searching on. This is another band engagement metric (beyond just listening) that would allow Last.fm to provide me with more targeted, accurate music recommendations.

Or another example, Google Zeitgeist and Trends is interesting, but it’s only a the tinniest little piece of all the interest information that Google knows. A third party provider could intervene and free up this aggregate search data. I can envision a third party service that requires people to contribute their own search history to a service in exchange for access and analysis of the aggregate of everyone’s search data.

I wonder how long this feature has been around and why more web services are not leveraging it?

Steve Jurvetson (the “J” in DFJ) stumbled upon a paintball stunt during Tree Week at Stanford, the time of year when the new tree is picked. He took some pictures and put them up on Flickr. There are a bunch of comments, which vary in entertainment value.

Oh nostalgia.